Court to hear four appeals, plus an Original case

Posted Tue, February 19th, 2008 10:04 am by Lyle Denniston

UPDATED to 11:40 a.m.

The Supreme Court agreed on Tuesday to further clarify when a labor union may charge non-union members for a share of the national union’s expenses — in this case, the cost of lawsuits that affect the union members’ rights generally, rather than the rights of local union members (Locke v. Karass, 07-610). The Court, among three other appeals granted, said it would decide when evidence must be barred from a criminal trial if it was found in a search based on erroneous information from an officer other than the ones who did the search – a test of the scope of the so-called “exclusionary rule.” (Herring v. U.S., 07-513).

The Court also added a case on the process by which a divorcing spouse can waive a right to the other spouse’s pension benefits under ERISA (Kennedy v. DuPont Plan Administrator, 07-636, only Question 3 was granted), and a case on the enforceability of a labor union contract that waives union members’ rights to go to court over claims of discrimination in the workplace (14 Penn Plaza v. Pyett, et al., 07-581).

The Court also took on, in a somewhat modified form, a dispute between the states of Montana and Wyoming (137 Original) over the uses of the waters of two tributaries of the Yellowstone River. While the Court, in agreeing to let one state sue another in a case that begins in the Supreme Court rather than in a lower court, often simply votes to review the full dispute, the Justices took a different tack this time — at the suggestion of the U.S. Solicitor General. Rather than proceed directly toward a probably years-long process of gathering evidence and then deciding the competing water rights issues, the Court on Tuesday allowed Montana to sue but then told Wyoming to file a motion to dismiss Montana’s lawsuit. That, according to the Solicitor General, will allow the Court first to resolve a series of underlying legal issues that could aid the Court in resolving the ultimate question over water rights. Wyoming has 45 days to file that motion, according to Tuesday’s order. Montana will then have 30 days to respond. The Court had asked the Solicitor General for the government’s views on the dispute.

Among the more significant cases the Court refused to hear was an appeal by the American Civil Liberties Union seeking to revive its lawsuit — dismissed by a federal appeals court — challenging the Bush Administration’s no-warrant program of electronic eavesdropping of global telephone calls and e-mails when that monitoring reaches inside the U.S. (ACLU v. National Security Agency, 07-468). A Sixth Circuit Court majority ruled that the groups and individuals who filed the challenge could not sue because they could not show that they had been wiretapped unless they had access to information that was beyond their reach because protected by the government’s “state secrets privilege.”

The Court invited the U.S. Solicitor General to offer the federal government’s views on three new cases, including one that seeks clarification of the power of U.S. courts to order a seizure of the assets in the U.S. of a foreign government accused of aiding terrorism, with the assets to be used to pay off a debt owed in the U.S. (Iran Defense Ministry v. Elahi, 07-615). The other two cases are variations on the question of the authority of a U.S. court to bar a company that loses a case and pays a money judgment from suing overseas to try to undo that judgment. The cases are Goss International Corp. v. TKS (07-618) and PT Pertamina v. Karaha Bodas Co. (07-619). There is no deadline for the Solicitor General to respond.

Among cases the Court refused to hear were these:

** Claims by Louisiana victims of Hurricane Katrina that they had been wrongly denied insurance coverage of their losses; the issue was whether a federal court, before rejecting the claims, should have sought advice from state courts on the meaning of Louisiana state insurance law. (Xavier University v. Travelers Casualty, 07-711, and Chehardy v. Allstate Indemnity, 07-713).

** An appeal by Fort Motor Co. contending that the cities of Seattle and Tacoma, Wash., unconstitutionally tax 100 percent of its wholesale sales of vehicles in those cities, even though a good deal of the wholesale activity actually occurs outside those cities. (Ford v. Seattle and Tacoma, 07-623).

** An appeal that asked the Court, for the first time, to spell out which members of a church staff are covered by federal and state laws on employment rights. The appeal by the Roman Catholic leadership in Washington, D.C., sought clarification of the so-called “ministerial exception” to employment laws. The specific case involved a church organist who claimed that he was fired illegally. (Archdiocese of Washington v. Moersen, 07-323).

Merits Case Pages and Archives

The court issued additional orders from the December 2 conference on Monday. The court did not grant any new cases or call for the views of the solicitor general in any cases. On Tuesday, the court released its opinions in three cases. The court also heard oral arguments on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. The calendar for the December sitting is available on the court's website. On Friday the justices met for their December 9 conference; Honeycutt v. United States.

Major Cases

Gloucester County School Board v. G.G.(1) Whether courts should extend deference to an unpublished agency letter that, among other things, does not carry the force of law and was adopted in the context of the very dispute in which deference is sought; and (2) whether, with or without deference to the agency, the Department of Education's specific interpretation of Title IX and 34 C.F.R. § 106.33, which provides that a funding recipient providing sex-separated facilities must “generally treat transgender students consistent with their gender identity,” should be given effect.

Bank of America Corp. v. City of Miami(1) Whether, by limiting suit to “aggrieved person[s],” Congress required that a Fair Housing Act plaintiff plead more than just Article III injury-in-fact; and (2) whether proximate cause requires more than just the possibility that a defendant could have foreseen that the remote plaintiff might ultimately lose money through some theoretical chain of contingencies.

Moore v. Texas(1) Whether it violates the Eighth Amendment and this Court’s decisions in Hall v. Florida and Atkins v. Virginia to prohibit the use of current medical standards on intellectual disability, and require the use of outdated medical standards, in determining whether an individual may be executed.

Pena-Rodriguez v. ColoradoWhether a no-impeachment rule constitutionally may bar evidence of racial bias offered to prove a violation of the Sixth Amendment right to an impartial jury.

Conference of December 9, 2016

FTS USA, LLC v. Monroe (1) Whether the Fair Labor Standards Act and the Due Process Clause permit a collective action to be certified and tried to verdict based on testimony from a small subset of the putative plaintiffs, without either any statistical or other similarly reliable showing that the experiences of those who testified are typical and can reliably be extrapolated to the entire class, or a jury finding that the testifying witnesses are representative of the absent plaintiffs; and (2) whether the procedure for determining damages upheld by the Sixth Circuit, in which the district court unilaterally determined damages without any jury finding, violates the Seventh Amendment.

Overton v. United States Whether, consistent with this Court's Brady v. Maryland jurisprudence, a court may require a defendant to demonstrate that suppressed evidence “would have led the jury to doubt virtually everything” about the government's case in order to establish that the evidence is material.

Turner v. United States (1) Whether, under Brady v. Maryland, courts may consider information that arises after trial in determining the materiality of suppressed evidence; and (2) whether, in a case where no physical evidence inculpated petitioners, the prosecution's suppression of information that included the identification of a plausible alternative perpetrator violated petitioners' due process rights under Brady.